No matter how much we say that we have progressed as a society and harp about gender equality, the bitter truth is that life will always be harder for women than it is for men. If we were to consider a married couple who are both working professionals and they decide to have a child, the woman in question will have more duties overall than the man. She would have to look after the child, the household and her job, while her husband would probably only do a fraction of her duties.
This was brought to light in a conversation between Twinkle Khanna and journalist Faye D’Souza. In a video that has gone viral, Twinkle says how despite being fairly progressive women, the onus is on them to take care of every aspect of their household along with their careers.
“…we are fairly progressive and yet the food, the house, the curtains, the diapers are still our job along with having a full-time job. What have we done to ourselves?” asks Twinkle Khanna.
To this Faye D’Souza shares her experience of becoming a mother and how during the first year of her son’s life, she was angry at her husband because it was her life that changed entirely and not his. She had to do all these motherly duties while he got to travel every now and then for work.
“I get really annoyed when people say ‘Oh but you’re such a supermom’, but I don’t want to be. I don’t want to be a supermom. For the first one year of my son’s life, I was just pissed at my husband all the time because his life didn’t change at all. And here I was not sleeping, I was breastfeeding at the time, I didn’t have enough mindspace to even read what was going on in the world. My husband was travelling on the drop of a hat for work. After all of that he gets to say ‘I have a son’. And I’m like, ‘No you don’t have a son. You’re a family friend at best’,” she said.
Here’s a look at the video:
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Underneath it, actor and Alia Bhatt’s mother Soni Razdan commented and shared how after she became a mother, she hated how her husband could walk out the door every morning because she couldn’t do the same for a very long time. Even if she took the baby out of the house with herself, it was a lot of work.
To this, a user on Instagram said that she shouldn’t have become a mother because it is, after all, a woman who gets pregnant and not a man.
To this, Soni Razdan responded by asking if a woman should not have feelings entirely because she decided to have a baby.
I think we as a society do not acknowledge the kind of physical and mental toll motherhood takes on a woman. We need to discard stereotypical notions about gender roles and stress the fact that parenthood is a two-way street and both the husband and wife need to take equal responsibility of the child. Don’t you think?